Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

July 23 - 29:
Wed 4:15(MM) & 7:00 / Thur 4:00 (Ends Thursday)

(USA / 2021 / Directed by Morgan Neville)

From Academy Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Roadrunner is an intimate behind-the-scenes look at how an anonymous chef became a world-renowned cultural icon. Reverberating with his presence and his voice, the film casts new light on the way he indelibly impacted the world around him.

Few humans seem to move through the world with as much wholehearted ferocity as the chef, writer, raconteur, and television host Anthony Bourdain. So the news that he had taken his own life at 61 landed with a particular jolt; had we really not known or understood him at all? Neville’s film is intimate enough to ask this question, and wise enough to know it ultimately can’t answer it. What emerges is a raw, illuminating portrait of a man whose passions ranged as far and wide as his passport carried him, but that could also lead to dangerous extremes. The majority of the movie is not grim by any means. Colleagues, family, and friends, including chefs David Chong and Éric Ripert and musicians Iggy Pop and Josh Homme, have enough wild stories to fill a bar till closing time. Steeped in the jittery punk rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, Roadrunner registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived.

R / 1 hr 58 mins.